It isn't just clear to me how this is used, but this scenario might be
desirable for you?

1) Create the external file description (empty) for SALES.
2) Do not use CL.
3) Change the F-specs to FSALES... usropn
4) In the *inzsr, write a small loop that displays a screen asking for
the fiscal year (or special suffix).
5) Once a valid suffix is chosen, do a OVRDBF and then open the user's
chosen file.
6) It wouldn't take much to have a new small program that can be called
in the *inzsr that has a window with a dropdown box of available years
(and other, special, suffixes) that can be chosen. That would probably
be used repeatedly by all of the various programs.

On 4/5/2012 2:13 PM, Victor Hunt wrote:

I do apologize in advance for asking about something most folks dealt with
years and years ago...

I have a large number of programs in our sales reporting system that were
written a very long time ago. We are in the beginning stages of upgrading
them. In most cases, these programs have program defined files. In almost
all cases, the file name is something like SALES. There isn't a file on our
system called SALES. There are however files called SALES2012, SALES2011,
etc. The CL has an OVRDBF command to point SALES to the appropriate
SALESYYYY file for processing. Of course, this is variable as any SALESYYYY
file going back 10 years can be selected by the user.

As part of the upgrade, we'd like to change all program defined files to
externally defined files. Unfortunately, the file SALES doesn't exist so
compiles would fail. I could change them all to SALES2012, but at some
point this file won't exist either. I can create an empty file named SALES
with the same layout and no records, but this still has it's problems
(there are many programs where the file is defined more then once, SALES1
and SALES2, for summary processing).

What is the best way to handle this situation? We are on 7.1 by the way if
it makes any difference in how we would handle this.

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